I feel so grateful to the man who invented the “Traveller’s” typewriter.

Mina Harker, expressing her love for her laptop.

Applying modern labels and understandings of people to the past is iffy and and remains so when applied to fictional characters who were certainly never written with those as-yet non-existent concepts in mind but also it’s fun so I’m going to do it. Mina Harker (née Murray) is an autistic, bisexual, and cool as hell.

None of what I’m going to say is a particularly original idea and much of what I’m drawing from here is from the general milieu of the Dracula Daily fanbase. This was, of course, a large part of the appeal of Dracula Daily; not just a novel way to read a classic book but also a participatory exercise in going through that work and evolving a fandom understanding of it as it progresses, with all the tenuous headcanoning that such things involve.

Dracula is Gothic fiction wherein the ancient horror is defeated and soundly routed by modernity. Our heroes are doctors and solicitors (and a rich Texan who fancies himself a cowboy) and an important weapon in the arsenal used to defeat the count himself is meticulous note-taking. And it is Mina who transcribes, edits, organises and distributes these notes. Within the fiction it is she who creates the manuscript that is the text of the novel itself and makes carbon copies to provide to the other protagonists. She habitually organises and sorts information and while she often frames it as making herself useful to her husband¹ she displays a clear knack and enthusiasm for doing so.

“When does the next train start for Galatz?” said Van Helsing to us generally.

“At 6.30 tomorrow morning!” We all started, for the answer came from Mrs. Harker.

“How on earth do you know?” said Art.

“You forget or perhaps you do not know, though Jonathan does and so does Dr. Van Helsing that I am the train fiend.”

“I am the train fiend”?! This girl autistic as hell.

Mina is also the one who sits down and logically deduces Dracula’s escape plan from everyone’s scattered notes and observations, writing it out her evidence and conclusions point by point.

Ground of inquiry. Count Dracula’s problem is to get back to his own place.

(a) He must be brought back by someone, This is evident; for had he power to move himself as he wished he could go either as man, or wolf, or bat, or in some other way. He evidently fears discovery or interference, in the state of helplessness in which he must be confined as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box.

(b) How is he to be taken? Here a process of exclusions may help us. By road, by rail, by water?

[…]

Van Helsing says that Mina has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart¹. While this is meant simply as a compliment of her faculties¹ the fact that her analytical nature is framed as inherently masculine reminds me of the (nonsense) extreme male brain theory of autism which is rooted in notions of men being naturally more systemising and women being naturally more empathising. This is starting to bend towards me just documenting some free association so I will move on to Mina being gay.

Mina and Lucy in the book have a classic romantic friendship, gushing and fawning over each other to a degree that is difficult not read as somewhat sapphic to a modern reader. Mina takes care of Lucy while she is being secretly preyed upon by Dracula, and while she sleeps Mina notes how beautiful she is, thinking about how it could make someone fall in love with her, about sex outside of marriage, and about the idea of women being able to make marriage proposals¹.

Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the “New Woman” won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that. I am so happy tonight, because dear Lucy seems better.

Later, not having seen Lucy in some time and unaware of her rapid deterioration, Mina sends a letter to Lucy that directly compares the love between her and her husband to the love between her and Lucy and that she could, would, has, does and will love her.

Jonathan asks me to send his “respectful duty,” but I do not think that is good enough from the junior partner of the important firm Hawkins & Harker; and so, as you love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his “love” instead. Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and all blessings on you.

The novel—the manuscript compiled by Mina herself—emphasises the tragedy of this goodbye and this expression of love by noting that this letter was not opened by Lucy before her death.

Also her favourite spot to hang out in on her holiday in Witby is the graveyard so she’s pretty goth, too.

I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.

A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog¹ that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”

The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby S.P.C.A. putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.

The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”

This post contains spoilers for Dracula, which is 128 years old.

I have not been keeping up with Dracula Daily as I had intended¹ but I wanted to make a post about it today. One of the features of the original Dracula that is often forgotten in adaptation is how modern it is. As an epistolary novel the story is mostly a series of diary entries and in the case of the character John Seward his diary, starting on the 25th of May, it is recorded on a phonograph—an invention that was only twenty years old at the time of the novel’s publication in 1897.

The book heavily involves the collision of the very modern and scientific with the ancient evil that is Count Dracula. The novel opens with Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, travelling to Transylvania in order to sort out a property deal for the count. This journey involves going from the comfort and regularity of well-timetabled trains to a treacherous carriage ride through the old, wild Carpathian mountains. With him, as well as the needed legal documents, he has photos taken on his Kodak² camera, which is far from the only piece of prominent technology.

The weapons used to fight Dracula are not just wooden stakes and crucifixes³ but also blood transfusions⁴, hypnotism⁵, next-day flower delivery from Haarlem to London⁶, shorthand⁷, meticulous note-taking, and in-depth knowledge of train timetables⁸. While it goes unremarked on in the book itself I like to imagine that Count Dracula’s statement that “to live in a new house would kill me” is due to a vampire’s inability to cross running water not playing very well with indoor plumbing. Abraham Van Helsing is not a young, sexy vampire hunter in this novel but an polymath professor with at least three doctorates⁹. Dracula is not that out of step with Buffy the Vampire Slayer answering the question of how to deal with a terrible and ancient demon with blowing it up with a bazooka.

But there is something else important about John Seward’s phonography: It ends up being extremely funny. Even just reading this and thinking that he is speaking this out loud to be recorded on a wax cylinder it seems incredibly obnoxious:

I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell. (Mem., Under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit of hell?) Omnia Romæ venalia sunt. Hell has its price! verb, sap. If there be anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards accurately, so I had better commence to do so, therefore R. M, Renfield, ætat 59. Sanguine temperament; great physical strength; morbidly excitable; periods of gloom ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out.

One presumes that he is saying “memorandum” out loud and not just “mem” as is transcribed. Later, when he records his conversations with Van Helsing he includes the full back and forth dialogue, with all of Van Helsing’s disfluencies, grammatical errors and strange turns of phrase. One has to wonder is Seward imitating his friend’s Dutch accent while recording this? Is he doing voices whenever he is making his diary? What does his Mina voice sound like? We are reading, within the fiction, a transcription of him speaking out loud. And we know who does the transcription because it happens during the course of the plot. The later part of the novel involves the protagonists meeting up and compiling all of their notes together into what is the text of the novel itself.

This is done by Mina Harker and the reason she starts doing this is, again, extremely funny: She walks in on Seward recording on his phonograph and asks to hear some of it. He initially agrees but then starts deflecting awkwardly that most if is about his medical cases. When Mina asks specifically to hear about the last few days of her friend Lucy Westenra’s life he admits that he has no idea how to find a specific diary entry in his phonograph recordings. He has been using this for at least the last four months and he just never thought about it at all. He has not labelled anything. He has no system of any kind. He has just been talking into this and never reviewing it in any way! This is what prompts Mina to start transcribing the entries for him, as well as typing up her and her husband’s shorthand diaries for everyone else to read and compiling all the other letters and newspaper clippings that make up the novel. Going back to the modernity of it all the most in-spirit adaptation of Dracula set in the modern day would surely be composed primarily of screenshots of social media posts and podcast segments.

There is one more interesting angle on the fact that Mina is the author, or at least the typesetter, of the book within the fiction: How she types up the dialogue of Renfield, Seward’s patient and devoted servant of Dracula. Renfield’s dialogue capitalises He, His, You, Your and Master when he is speaking of Dracula, something that is only proper to do when referring to God¹⁰. This is obviously meant to ascribe a blasphemous devotion to Dracula to Renfield, but within the story it is Mina who is choosing to capitalise his words in this manner and Mina is also, at this point, partially under Dracula’s influence. While I don’t think that this was Bram Stoker’s intent we could read this an an unconscious sign of Dracula’s influence over Mina’s mind.

I’ve made some tweaks and corrections to this post, including fixing some confusion I had about Arthur Holmwood’s name.

I first read Dracula in 2022, following along with Dracula Daily, a newsletter that sends out sections of the book on the date in which they occur¹. One of my posts about it on Tumblr actually ended up in the print version. The following year I read it again, this time following along with two other versions of the book: Powers of Darkness and Dracula in Istanbul, English retranslations of Icelandic and Turkish translations of the original novel respectively. It was interesting to compare the changes made in each version. I made a graphic showing how both version abridge the story compared to the original. That year I also read the comic book adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Last year I did not read Dracula again but this year I had a notion: To pick up an Irish translation and follow through the book simultaneously with my print copy of Dracula Daily². This has immediately got off to a bad start: I was busy yesterday and so didn’t even start on the 3rd of May, the date of first entry of Jonathan Harker’s journal. The other, much larger and in hindsight very predictable problem is that my level of Irish is not really up to reading this. I had intended to get more practise in on simpler books before this but I have but limited time upon this Earth and a condition that results in poor executive function.

Still, there are some interesting things here even at a glance. I am always curious about how proper nouns are handled in translation. Here there is a mixture of Gaelicisation and leaving things as is. Jonathan Harker is Seon Ó hEarcair³ but Dracula remains Dracula (with his title of count translated as cunta). Most placenames use their standard Irish names—Transylvania is Transalváin—but Munich is actually reverted to its native München.

Flicking ahead I can see that Mina Murray is Mín Ní Mhuirí⁴ and John Seward is Seán Suaird⁵ but other names are left unchanged or only partially translated. Lucy Westenra is now Laoise⁶ Westenra and Arthur Holmwood is Artúr⁷ Holmwood. Abraham Van Helsing and Mr. Quincy P. Morris are unchanged, with the English honorific still being used sometimes in the text. Other minor characters like Renfield seem to keep their English names. I can’t really tell what the basis was here for deciding which names to translate or not.

Returning to section for the 3rd of May there are some abridgements. The section on the various nationalities of Transylvania is cut entirely⁸ and more tragically Jonathan’s little memoranda to get the recipes for paprika hendl, mămăligă and împănată to give to Mina are cut as well.

Bram Stoker himself was an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin and a lot of people say that the choice of the name Dracula for the eponymous vampire was not only inspired by the historical Vlad the Impaler but also because it sounds vaguely like “droch-fhola”, a phrase that could be read as “evil blood” in Irish. It’s not true at all, but people say it!

One last thing to note about this translation is that the cover is quite funny.